Story Highlights

Of all the challenges posed by globalization, regulating abusive corporate practices has long been particularly difficult.

From Asian sweatshops supplying brands like Nike and Apple, to the oil giant Shell polluting and abetting violence in Nigeria, recent decades have been rife with tales of multinationals harming communities in which they operate – usually in low-income, weakly governed countries.

In the absence of international laws that govern corporate conduct, preventing such practices – let alone providing recourse for those victimized – can often seem impossible.

How, in a world where national sovereignty remains paramount, can globally operating firms be held accountable for causing cross-border harm?

In 2005, Kofi Annan, the then-United Nations secretary general, called on John Ruggie, a professor of human rights and international affairs at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government. Annan appointed Ruggie to examine this problem and identify a road map forward. Ruggie's process, which culminated in a set of "Guiding Principles" on business and human rights that were endorsed in 2011 by the UN Human Rights Council, is now the subject of a book.

In Just Business: Multinational Corporations and Human Rights, Ruggie provides a behind the scenes look into an unusual global policy process highlighted by his personal experience in crafting a set of principles that current UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon has called the "authoritative global standard for preventing and addressing adverse impacts on human rights arising from business-related activity."

As Just Business makes evident, Ruggie's mandate – a pro-bono, part-time exercise – was stacked from the outset with several procedural and normative challenges. At the time of his appointment as "UN Special Representative on the Issue of Human Rights and Transnational Corporations and other Business Enterprises," he writes, the global business and human rights playing field was a "deeply divided arena of discourse and contestation, lacking shared knowledge, clear standards and boundaries."

Since 2003, businesses and human rights groups had been locked in a stalemate over a UN-drafted document called "Norms on the Responsibilities of Transnational Corporations and other Business Enterprises with Regard to Human Rights." The document would have imposed on companies in a given country's "sphere of influence," the same human rights duties that nations have accepted for themselves under treaties they have ratified.

Lacking support of businesses and most governments, the norms were rejected by the UN Commission on Human Rights (the precursor of the Human Rights Council), although many advocacy groups continued to push for some sort of overarching legal framework that would require firms to adhere to minimum human rights standards. Thus, when Ruggie concluded that the foundations for a treaty-based legal approach were lacking, he won few fans in the NGO community.

"In effect, the (Human Rights Council) endorsed the status quo: a world where companies are encouraged, but not obliged, to respect human rights," the advocacy group Human Rights Watch stated after the UN endorsed Ruggie's Guiding Principles. "Guidance isn't enough – we need a mechanism to scrutinize how companies and governments apply these principles."

Although Just Business acknowledges such criticism, much of the book is spent making the case that Ruggie's Guiding Principles do in-fact have "bite." Ruggie's principles are based on a framework where nations have duties to protect against human rights abuses by third parties, companies have duties to avoid infringing on the rights of others, and victims have access to judicial and non-judicial remedy.

Ruggie concedes that a legal framework viewed with hostility by business and governments would have failed in trying to bring too much change too soon. But he argues that his "normative platform of high level policy prescriptions" offers a more realistic, and ultimately more successful, path forward.

According to Ruggie, the uptake of his Guiding Principles by several international standard-setting bodies, including the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, is a sign his work has already begun to a foster a global culture of corporate due diligence that will ultimately drive long-term human rights progress. In 2011, the OECD revised its Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises to incorporate a chapter on human rights.

Ruggie's argument, though persuasive, could be enhanced through the use of more concrete examples of how his principles have and will continue to help mitigate abusive corporate practices in specific human rights situations. For instance, although Ruggie traces a path from his mandate to a provision in the United States' 2010 Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform Act that requires U.S.-listed companies sourcing minerals from conflict-affected areas in the Democratic Republic of Congo to undertake several due-diligence efforts, he does so with such haste that it fails to make a meaningful impact.

Overall, Just Business could be strengthened by more in-depth examples of the multinational regulation conundrum in action. Though the book is intended as a chronicle of Ruggie's standard-setting process – and not a collection of case studies – the rigidity of its academic prose could be softened by a bit of real-world color.

Nonetheless, for readers with an interest in the nuts-and-bolts of the global policymaking process – as well as the mechanisms through which human rights norms will continue to evolve – Just Business is an essential start.

Rosen is a freelance journalist focusing on sub-Saharan Africa and the global economy.